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The open-source oVirt virtualization project debuted its 3.4 release on March 27, providing users with new features to meet the expanding needs of workload virtualization.
The oVirt open-source project is led by enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat and serves as the basis for the commercially supported Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) product, which competes with VMware’s vSphere. With the release of oVirt 3.4, the RHEV 3.4 product is now entering beta, and will soon serve as an update to RHEV 3.3, which debuted in January.
New capabilities in the oVirt 3.4 release include the ability for users to choose different types of storage.
In the previous oVirt versions, a storage pool was restricted to a single storage type, Scott Herold, principal product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, explained to eWEEK. “With oVirt 3.4, different storage types can be used to create a storage pool, such as combining NFS and Fibre Channel in a single pool,” Herold said.
The oVirt 3.4 release also provides users with new deployment options. Prior to the oVirt 3.4 release, the oVirt management engine could not be installed in a virtual machine that was managed by oVirt.
“So, typically, customers deployed the oVirt engine on a physical machine or on a virtual machine that wasn’t managed or monitored,” Herold said. “The oVirt 3.4 release adds the ability for oVirt to self-host its engine, including monitoring and recovery of the virtual machine.”
The new deployment capability also minimizes the hardware footprint required by the hypervisor manager to get a virtual environment up and running, Herold said. The ability to self-host the oVirt engine provides the oVirt 3.4 release with the ability to provide high-availability services to the oVirt manager, meaning if the host it is on were to fail, it would start on an alternate host in the cluster.
Going a step further, oVirt 3.4 also includes a CPU hot-plugging capability that enables users to to scale hardware resources vertically without having to restart the virtual machine.
Networking also gets a boost in the oVirt 3.4 release by way of an integration with the OpenStack Neutron networking service. OpenStack Neutron is a core project within the open-source OpenStack cloud platform providing software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities to the cloud.
“The oVirt Neutron integration allows oVirt to delegate the management of virtual networks to an OpenStack Network controller,” Herold said.
RHEV 3.4
The new oVirt 3.4 release serves as the basis for the commercially supported RHEV 3.4 release, which is now in beta. Herold explained that within RHEV, Red Hat leverages the upstream oVirt packages and provides additional testing and validation of the components.
“We ensure the RHEV release is enterprise-ready and as stable as possible for Red Hat customers,” Herold said. “There is no supported migration path from oVirt to RHEV, in the same way that there is no supported migration path from Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.